source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 20:21:50 -0800 Subject: science and such From: Gary Morrison > Math and science, religion and mysticism...what's the difference? Music could well be the one topic that all four address most nearly equally. So to understand music, you'd have to see it from all of those disciplines' viewpoints. But the MUST remain separate viewpoints, and can never be merged. Here's the key point: Science raises PLENTY of questions we DO NOT know the answer to, but it NEVER raises questions that we CANNOT know the answer to. The goal of science is to make what was once unknown, become absolutely obvious, unambiguous, and just plain as day. But the situation is the opposite for mysticism and religion. The obvious and unambiguous are what are of marginal interest at best to mysticism. What's interesting are the haunting little questions like, "why when I hear Brahms' Requiem late at night in a dark room does it sometimes make me smile like a baby and sometimes make me cry like a baby?" You know as well as I do that a neurophysiologist could prattle off an answer, probably involving neurotransmission enzyme action across synaptic .. trimethyl-dibenzyl ... neuron firing rates ... ... autonomic hormonal .. ... capillarian blood flow to the hippcampal ... And you also know as well as I do that that wouldn't answer the question at all! So you'd certainly be absolutely correct to recognize that music manifests itself both as the purely objective physical reality of sound waves, and in the joyous, curious, haunting, devastating, or inspiring waves of emotion it splashes through our minds. But you'd equally certainly be sadly mistaken if you think that you can apply scientific law to mystic sensation, or apply mystical inspiration to solving differential equations! Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 19 Mar 1997 13:24 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA05693; Wed, 19 Mar 1997 13:24:13 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA05686 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id EAA11738; Wed, 19 Mar 1997 04:22:01 -0800 Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 04:22:01 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu